1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of portal environment management and more particularly to the field of viewing content in a portlet within a portal environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Distributing content about large computer communications networks is not without its challenges. In particular, the quantity of content available for distribution in a computer communications network often varies proportionally to the size of the computer communications network. At the extreme, the Internet hosts a vast quantity of content not easily accessible by most end-users. Portals represent a sensible solution to the problem of aggregating content through a channel paradigm in a single, network-addressable location. In consequence, portals have become the rage in content distribution.
Portlets are the visible active components included as part of portal pages. Similar to the graphical windows paradigm of windowing operating systems, each portlet in a portal occupies a portion of the portal page through which the portlet can display associated content from a portlet channel. Portlets are known to include both simple applications such as an electronic mail client, and also more complex applications such as forecasting output from a customer relationship management system. The prototypical portlet can be implemented as server-side scripts executed through a portal server.
From the end-user perspective, a portlet is a content channel or application to which the end-user can subscribe. By comparison, from the perspective of the content provider, a portlet is a means through which content can be distributed in a personalized manner to a subscribing end-user. Finally, from the point of view of the portal, a portlet merely is a component which can be rendered within the portal page. In any case, by providing one or more individually selectable and configurable portlets in a portal, portal providers can distribute content and applications through a unified interface in a personalized manner according to the preferences of the end-user.
Portal servers are computer programs which facilitate the distribution of portal based Web sites on the public Internet or a private intranet. Importantly, it will be recognized by one of ordinary skill in the art that the signature characteristic of all conventional portal servers can include the aggregation of content from several portlet applications within a single distributable page in a uniform manner. To that end, each portlet application within the portal page can be represented by a portlet user interface distributed by the portal server to requesting client computing devices.
In a portal environment, it is a common operation for a user to customize a portal view by adding content to the portal view. In many cases, the content to be added is basic content that has been obtained from another application or location by way of a cut-and-paste or drag-and-drop operation. Basic content often includes copied text, graphics or image content, entire documents, spreadsheets, streaming data sources, Weblogs, RSS or syndicated content feeds, or other reference objects like a uniform resource locator (URL). In order to add basic content to a portal view, the portal view already must include a corresponding viewer—typically a portlet application configured for rendering the pertinent basic content. If the portal view does not already include a corresponding viewer, a configuration mode must be utilized through which a corresponding viewer can be selected for addition to the portal page.
United States Patent Application Publication No. US 2004/0123238 A1 to Hefetz et al. for SELECTIVELY INTERPRETED PORTAL PAGE LAYOUT TEMPLATE (hereinafter, “Hefetz”), partially addresses the accommodation of a drag-and-drop operation for adding content to a portal page in a portal environment. In Hefetz, during the design phase of a portal page, a placeholder in a portal template can be translated into a representation of a container designed to present portal content. Subsequently, during run-time, dynamic content can be received from a dynamic content source and the placeholder in the portal template can be translated into a presentation of the container containing portal dynamic content components.
Notwithstanding the solution proposed by Hefetz, in order to accommodate a drag-and-drop operation for basic content, the portal page must be pre-configured at design-time with a placeholder for a container able to render the basic content provided in a drag-and-drop operation at run-time. The use of a placeholder in the absence of a drag-and-drop operation can be inefficient and can needlessly consume real estate in the portal view. Moreover, to properly pre-configure the placeholder, some a priori knowledge of the content to be added to the portal view must exist.